Esperanza is the most fully developed character in the book. All our information about her comes from her; some things she tells us directly (and we must be alert to the possibility that they are perhaps true only at the moment she says them), others indirectly in her reported actions, thoughts, and feelings. Some things about her we can never know, but because her voice is both direct and intimate, we can "know" her in some ways better than her friends and family do, better perhaps than she knows herself.
On one hand, Esperanza is a typical young adolescent girl, at some moments a child and at some an adult. She jumps rope with her friends, rides three on a bike, is drawn to a good Bugs Bunny cartoon. Very late in the book, she says of a neighbor, "I like Alicia because once she gave me a little leather purse with the word GUADALAJARA stitched on it . . . " — a very childish locution, for we know that Esperanza's feelings of liking and admiration for Alicia are not at all that simple.
On the other hand, this woman-child can exhibit very mature insights. Her assessments of Sally ("all you wanted was to love, . . . and no one could call that crazy") and of Marin ("waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life"), for example, show her innate ability not only to recognize another person's motives but also to empathize with others, both signs of mental and emotional maturity. They are also signs of an imaginative intelligence that marks Esperanza as something more than average. She is a very bright girl who likes to read, to learn things and put new information together, to show off what she knows. Moreover, her intelligence is specifically creative, as is shown by her poetry, her originality, and especially her characteristic way of describing things in imaginative similes and other metaphors.
